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Mark Steyn

Hagel and defense cuts: The price of ObamaCare

Who would you hire for the Pentagon’s east-of-Suez moment? According to the Washington Post, Obama picked Hagel to “bridge the partisan divide.”

Even for the court eunuchs of the palace media, that must be hard to type with a straight face: He seems to be all but entirely loathed by his own party. Nevertheless, he is technically a Republican, not to mention a bona fide war hero. Only Nixon can go to China, and only a pro-life, pro-gun, climate-denialist, homophobic, Strom Thurmond–loving, medal-draped Republican can go to the Pentagon and tell them to start clearing out their desks. Obama has picked a guy whose rhetoric is more anti-Pentagon than his own, and who, unlike most of the cabinet senators, has a record of executive experience that suggests he may well live up to it.

If he pulls it off, it’ll be a big part of Obama’s legacy. And, if he doesn’t, I’m sure the media will be happy to remind everyone that, oh well, Hagel was a Republican.

But beyond the politics is a real question. He’s not wrong to raise the question of Pentagon “bloat.” The United States has the most lavishly funded military on the planet, and what does it buy you? In the Hindu Kush, we’re taking twelve years to lose to goatherds with fertilizer.

If we pull out of NATO, and Japan, and Korea, and the Middle East, guess what happens. War.

Paul-Cincy on January 12, 2013 at 8:44 PM

NATO is a joke, Paul. It consists of us holding up a bunch of patty-cake European nations that haven’t done diddly since the USSR fell apart plus pseudo-Western Turkey. It’s little better than the UN in terms of being good for anything.

Fiscal reality will override you on everything else, except possibly supporting Israel, because if they fall all Islamic rage is on our backs and we are not ready for that scenario.

As worries over Greece rattle world markets, records and interviews show that with Wall Street’s help, the nation engaged in a decade-long effort to skirt European debt limits. One deal created by Goldman Sachs helped obscure billions in debt from the budget overseers in Brussels.

Even as the crisis was nearing the flashpoint, banks were searching for ways to help Greece forestall the day of reckoning. In early November — three months before Athens became the epicenter of global financial anxiety — a team from Goldman Sachs arrived in the ancient city with a very modern proposition for a government struggling to pay its bills, according to two people who were briefed on the meeting.

The bankers, led by Goldman’s president, Gary D. Cohn, held out a financing instrument that would have pushed debt from Greece’s health care system far into the future, much as when strapped homeowners take out second mortgages to pay off their credit cards.

It had worked before. In 2001, just after Greece was admitted to Europe’s monetary union, Goldman helped the government quietly borrow billions, people familiar with the transaction said. That deal, hidden from public view because it was treated as a currency trade rather than a loan, helped Athens to meet Europe’s deficit rules while continuing to spend beyond its means.

It was healthcare, and postponing the cost, that created the unresolvable debt bubble in Greece. Of course, without Goldman Sachs et al, the bubble would have burst sooner, for the better of the EU citizens. Goldman Sachs et al didn’t do this for nothing

The Obamacare model is duplicating the disaster, right down to the phoney, deferred financing. Hagel can castrate every soldier in the army and the Obamacare bubble will still burst, down the road, after the current Obama pork and destroy bubble bursts

I am surprised the NYT leaves this article available on the web, because it condemns the SOBs in G-Sachs (who was running our Treasury?) as well as the lying SOBs in the various governments, as well as the ostriches masquerading as citizens